Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (18 page)

“I’m guessing tofu or yogurt is out of the question too.” He was right. Food of any sort wasn’t in the cards for me tonight. He did open the refrigerator again to give me four of the smaller bottles of Gatorade. “At least
try to get these down. Collapsing from dehydration severely affects your aim,” he said dryly before taking in the condition of the apartment. “I’ll clean up here. I’ll get you clean clothes and you can shower, then sleep. Take Cal’s bed. You deserve it. As that garbage dump is your lifelong signature, I would be surprised if it’s not the same at twenty-six.”

I didn’t deny the truth of that, but I shook my head. “You shower, leave me some clothes for when I do, and go to bed. Take Cal with you. You trust me mostly, but with that Cal”—I nodded toward the couch—“you don’t trust anyone but yourself.” And if Niko thought I looked bad, he needed a mirror. He’d had a series of shocks today with finding out his brother was the target of an assassin, the same brother but older came back from the future to save him, plus he’d fought his first skin-walker, which would freak the hell out of anyone who did that and lived. Lastly, he’d found out he was dead, which made me a suicide hotline’s wet dream. That banking on the fact it was possible to stop my brother from dying was the sole reason I stood here alive now. He’d lived two years now with that scenario with both him and Cal alternating in starring roles in the back of his mind. He couldn’t know how I felt, but he could imagine a hazy shape of it.

“Go,” I reiterated. “I’ll sleep on the couch just in case your neighbors show up and try to break in to drink our blood or other bodily fluids you don’t want to know about. In the morning, Cal will be up and all three of us can clean up this petting zoo meets slasher movie.”

He hesitated, but he knew his limitations. He knew when he should listen to them and when he couldn’t afford it. Nodding, he went to the couch, bent down, and slung Cal over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

“You can’t tell him, remember. About the Vigil, the assassin, sure—but not about Goodfellow and not about my Nik. You’re different but you’re also the same. If he finds out about my Nik, he will lose his shit. It won’t matter that it’s eight years from now or that we might be able to stop it. He will still lose his shit all over the damn
place because he’ll have your gravestone in his head, a gravestone with the year you die. That you leave him. Then he’ll do the only thing he can, be all over you like glitter and glue in a preschool art class. He won’t leave your side for a second, so get used to pissing with an audience for a while. All that is going to make him worse than useless against Lazarus. He’ll be like a live grenade someone tripped and dropped inside a tank full of soldiers. Bouncing back and forth, a potential messy death for everyone in the vicinity. Basically he’ll be as insane as I am right now, both of us trying to save our brothers any way we can.”

Niko tried to meet my eyes, but couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. He knew what was behind them now. “I forgive you for the snake. I’ll tell Cal we simply missed it and he won’t kill you over breakfast.” He did raise his gaze enough to look at me. “Thank you. And stay with us, please, as long as you can.”

Stay with us. Stay
alive
as long as you can bear it. What to say to that?

As it turned out, nothing. He’d taken the pressure of replying off me by turning and hoisting Cal to Niko’s own, much cleaner, bedroom. If something made it past me, then they had Niko to face before they had a prayer of making it to Cal.

I waited until the shower went on and off and Niko’s bedroom door closed. Taking my own shower, I didn’t care that the water was cold. It hadn’t been warm once the entire time we’d lived here. Scrubbing my skin free of blood, venom, spider juice, the scent of fertilizer and chemicals, of smoke and burned flesh, it was fine. If there hadn’t been water, I’d have used the scouring pads we had for our one pot. Removing a layer of skin would’ve
been good as well. After drying off and dressing in Niko’s sparring sweats, I went back to the scene of crime, sneered at it, and then searched the kitchen for garbage bags. I found one small box with thin white bags two and a half feet tall. I tore a jagged hole in one by pulling it out of the box with too much enthusiasm. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “How the hell did we survive without Costco?”

It was about 5:30 a.m. when Niko woke up. His normal wake-up time, but he’d gone to bed earlier by hours than usual last night. Skin-walkers did take it out of you. He was dragging a Cal with eyes three-fourths of the way shut. Shoving him into the bathroom, he said, “Shower. For a very long time. I put up with the dried coyote blood on you last night out of consideration for your fragile state in reaction to an overgrown garter snake, but my selfless and giving nature has its limits. Go and scrub until you do not smell like dead dog any longer.” There was an incoherent snarl and the slam of the bathroom door. I sympathized. It was the same reaction I had to 5:30 a.m.

“What . . .” Niko had come up to and then gone past the couch, swiveling his head back and forth to cover every inch. “You were supposed to be sleeping. What did you do? No, that’s obvious. Why did you do it? You said the three of us would clean up in the morning. And my Cal does not clean, making this highly suspicious behavior.”

I snorted. “Your Cal has yet to live with the stench of leaving dead creepy-crawlies overnight to take care of the next day. The blood seeps between the tiles all night long and stays under there, stinking up the place more and more every day long after the bodies are gone. We learned our lesson the first time we had to rip up the entire floor and let it soak in bleach for a week before we could replace it with a new one. We like being lazy, he
and I, but we like being able to breathe without choking or puking more.”

Niko had gone from turning his head to pivoting his entire body. His eyebrows were raised so far that if you could sprain your forehead, he would’ve. “All the bodies, the blood, the venom, the—”

He had to be thinking about the thick slime that had sprayed out of the ruptured, punctured, and squashed spiders. “Ick,” I supplied, slouching on the couch, my fingers rolling a long length between them, putting the finished product into a large Tupperware bowl old enough to qualify as an antique, and then starting on the next strip. “Just call it ick. You’ve used ichor enough times that the word is more repulsive than the actual gunk itself.”

I don’t think he heard me. “And the sand. Everything. It’s gone.” He finally ended up facing me. “How?”

“With what you guys keep in stock, it wasn’t easy.” I yawned, eyes gritty, muscles tight with the feeling you get when you’re too tired to sleep. “But I remembered the
rusalka
, the lamia, and the wendigo. I’ve never figured out what
rusalka
get out of drowning people, but it does leave entire bodies to dispose of. The lamia”—I winced—“are a little like vampires, but they don’t care about drinking blood. They care about drinking everything. You don’t want to know how they do it. Don’t ask. Point is it leaves bodies too, but they weigh less. They’re like a juice box a snot-nosed little kid has drained dry. The wendigo eats everything but the bones. Disposal, you’d think, would be easier, but it’s not. The bones spear through your average garbage bag like a knife through butter.”

I shrugged and smirked wearily. “I just made like a friendly neighbor and borrowed all their heavy-duty extra-large family-sized boxes of Costco garbage bags.” I was beginning to feel like an ad placement in my own life for those damned things. “Because this”—I glared as I snatched up one of his will-o’-the-wisp, tissue paper, tiny garbage bags off the cushion next to me and flipped it in his face—“does not get the job done. Thank fuck
you had a few gallons of bleach around so I could scrub the floor once I got rid of the sand. You need to start shopping like a fanatically enthusiastic, wildly prolific serial killer. An ‘I love my hobby, have multiple orgasms with each body I drag home, nightly cruising’ serial killer. It’s how you stay prepared for when assholes like the skin-walker come along.”

He snapped the plastic away from his face, which wore a perplexed expression I didn’t know he had in him. “What did you do with all the bagged bodies? What did you do with all the
sand
?”

“Bodies are in your Dumpster, which I then swapped with one down the street. Sand is in the hall. Without an industrial vacuum it takes weeks to get rid of sand. In the hall was good enough.” I rolled up another strip and plunked it in the bowl. “Put industrial wet-dry vac on your Christmas list. I’m Mary frigging Poppins here to whip you two into shape. Aren’t you lucky?”

Niko was beginning to focus more clearly as the shock of a Cal who cleaned, if for massacres only, began to sink in. He pointed at the bowl. “And that?”

“Snakeskin. I skinned them before I bagged them. Cal did say he wanted a pair of snakeskin boots when I made the offer.” I didn’t give a damn if he got the boots—unless he managed to hold on to them long enough they made it to me someday. Skin-walker boots. I’d impress even myself with those. More to the point, I didn’t have anything else to do and sleep wasn’t an option. Neither was eating.

Perplexed Niko was gone, replaced by unimpressed Niko. That was a Niko I was used to seeing every day. “You didn’t sleep. Not at all.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Isn’t that the saying?” A saying, prediction, an absolute truth if things didn’t go my way. Rock, paper, scissors.

I had tried to sleep, against my better judgment. Sixty seconds with my eyes closed was the equivalent of the longest IMAX movie made of the god-awful moment of my life. The flames were real enough I thought I could touch them. I’d tried. Then I opened my eyes and went
with the theory that I had three days before sleep deprivation had me hallucinating. That was three days to put one in Lazarus’s head. Time limits, I could deal with them easier than I could deal with sleeping.

“Hey, who stole my favorite jeans?” Cal stomped up, sheet around his hips as last night we’d run out of the six whole towels they owned, Niko and I using the last two with our showers. He was leaving a wide puddle on the floor I’d spent part of the night cleaning, but it was a clear puddle. Blood I’d wipe up. Clean water, that’s where the laziness came in. It’d dry eventually on its own. Cal’s soaked hair hung flattened around his face and dripping steadily.

“Your only clean pair? That’d be me. Niko’s sweats were a complete loss with all the blood and guts I spent half the night in on my knees scrubbing like your combination babysitter and maid.” I finished with the last strip of scaled skin, threw it in the bowl, and tossed the whole thing to Cal. He caught it one handed while losing half his grip on his sheet. “Here you go. Find yourself a boot maker. Oh, I borrowed a T-shirt too. I had a duffel bag with two changes of clothes and a shitload of weapons you’d give up sex for in a second—when you have it. I couldn’t fit the flamethrower, but I had my varsity lineup in there.”

None of it had done me any good, as it had been resting by Niko’s feet for him to keep an eye on while I went for the pizzas. “Time travel didn’t agree with them for some reason.” I lied as easily as my heart beat—smooth and even. Not a single blip in my heart rate. Polygraphs are worthless when you’re amoral and then some. “I came through, but no duffel bag. I’m lucky the trip included the clothes I was wearing and the weapons on me. Doing covert crap like walking down the sidewalk to a hole-in-the-wall bar while naked and it’s not quite dark yet, that would be a pain in the ass.”

I stood up and stretched, every bone in my back cracking audibly. “Wait. Where’d you get that shirt? Where did the shirt get
that
?” Niko had gone from perplexed, stunned, unimpressed, and was heading toward
either embarrassed or disapproving. He’d used his entire weekly allotment of facial expressions in less than four minutes. A record if ever there was one.

“This?” I plucked at the medium gray T-shirt. “I borrowed it from Cal with the jeans.” It was plain or had been. These were the days when my sarcasm was verbal. I hadn’t branched out into visual to go with that for four or so years yet. Having none with me, I’d made my own. I searched around the drawer I vaguely remembered as the one drawer we’d used to hold all our pens, marker, notepads. Finding a red marker, I’d come up with my own snarky shirt, although it was a real place. It was a thriving franchise thanks to the Kin, the werewolf mafia. It read:

HUMPERS

Werewolf Strip Club

Full! Frontal! Fur!

Best
TAIL
in town!

I’d thought about trying for their trademark sexy wolf in the middle of it, but an artist I wasn’t. “No,” Niko denied firmly. “I am not leaving this apartment or standing anywhere near you if you wear that. You look like an unhinged interspecies pervert.”

Cal was more interested than offended. “Werewolf strip club. Huh.” He was less casual than he thought. “So is that a real pl—”

Niko clapped his hand over his mouth. “No. You are not starting down that path on my watch. You’d have fleas and be rabid within a week. You, Caliban, change the shirt.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t get your panties wedged up too high. You’ll be sterile before Cal is rabid.” I stripped off the shirt, turned it inside out, and put it back on. It now read:

W
EREWOLVES

O
NCE YOU GO FURRY,

Y
OU NEVER HAVE TO WORRY.

I hadn’t managed a wolf on the other side, but I did accomplish a mildly lopsided paw print on this one. “There. Happy now, grandma?”

“No. Disgusted and appalled, but I would
not
say happy.”

I was thinking of an outrageous lie to make him worry about his own taste, something along the lines of the retro stage that would hit in two years that would have him cutting his hair into the longest mullet in the city, when there was a knock on the door. I gave up. He wouldn’t have believed me.

There was only one reason Niko cut his hair.

“Yeah,” I grumbled, “you two stay there. One half-naked sheet burrito flooding the floor and a seizure waiting to happen over my taste in shirts. Don’t answer your own door.” Not that I would have let them. If one of us had to die, I’d be the least damaging to all our lives. I reached for the Glock tucked in the back of the jeans I was wearing. We knew Lazarus wasn’t aware of this address, but I’d rather be safe and alive than sorry and dead. At least if I did end up dead, I’d be buried in a hilarious T-shirt. Gun hidden behind me, I stayed to one side of the door in case anyone tried to shoot through it. After the second knock, I leaned over for a split second there-and-back look out of the peephole.

Wicked—and not wicked as in an impish, mischievous manner but more of the full-blown demonic kind—green eyes, brown hair halfway between curly and wavy, and a grin wide enough for ten car salesmen despite being just the one.

Oh, fuck me sideways. I should’ve caught his scent. Why hadn’t I . . . The bleach I’d used to scrub the tile floor. It remained hanging in the air, a noxious fog that would block out any other smell for days. I slid over and rested my forehead against the door, holding back the impulse to bang it repeatedly. With the third cheerful knock—how could a knock be cheerful—I groaned, “Jesus Christ.”

“Nope.” The voice exceeded the cheer of the knock.
And it was familiar. God, was it. “I dated his cousin though. Great set of yabbos.”

“Damn,” Cal commented, clutching at his sheet with one hand and balancing the bowl of snakeskin with the other. “I’m an atheist and I’m not sure I wanted to hear that.”

I did bang my head against the door this time. I’d lived through hearing that line once before. Of all the things I could relive, hearing that again wasn’t at the top of my list.

It wasn’t who it was. Who it was had flashes of light darting across my sight. Shock led to low blood pressure, low blood pressure led to annoying yellow streaks, and wishing you had the luxury of keeling over to stare at the ceiling for a while. But I didn’t and blinked them away instead. It was a shock all right, but the good kind, the best. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was here a year too goddamn early. As he was the linchpin of us living through the next year, any mistakes at this point and you should go ahead, climb a mountain, sing “Kumbayah,” and drink the Kool-Aid, because those nut jobs, for once, would be right.

“Stay here,” I told Niko and Cal. “This is . . . complicated. Niko, tell your brother about how lazy shits who sit on their asses instead of sweeping the aftermath of a fight get bitten by poisonous giant snakes. And brief him on the Vigil/Lazarus crap while you’re at it. I’m too tired to go over that again.” Niko gave a minute nod to show he remembered what and what not to let Cal in on—nearly everything.

I yanked open the door just enough to slip through and keep the person in the hall hidden, stepped out, and slammed it shut behind me. Unlike Niko and Cal, he didn’t look any younger. I could’ve gone back eighty years or eight hundred, he’d be the same. As a precaution, I started down the hall. It wouldn’t matter if Niko caught a glimpse of him as he was one of the secrets Niko was currently keeping, but Cal didn’t need to if we could avoid it. “You couldn’t resist, could you? Not for
one
goddamned year?” I accused. “Never mind I told you to stay away until then or you could foul it all up.”

“Your note said we have eight years before the world was deprived of me, the brilliance of its one true sun. There’s clearly no hurry. And I never foul up, as you say, anything,” he discounted smugly with an actual snap of the fingers. That was the same. I should suggest he get new annoying habits. That one was getting stale.

“I hate to tell you you’re wrong, wait, no, I don’t. You’re
wrong
. It’s not like what will happen in eight years is the first time we all almost die or
do
die,” I snapped. “That’s practically a yearly occurrence for us, like freaking Christmas. But we get through it or we would have if we kept everything the same. Yet you fucked that up in
nine
hours. What, did it feel like a year? Did you set your alarm wrong, one year to nine hours? Easy mistake, right? This will screw up so much future shit. Forget eight years. We’ll be lucky to survive six months. In a year, we will be dead, as there’s no avoiding that particular coming cluster fuck. We shouldn’t have made it through the first time. This is all because of your”—impatience, curiosity, insatiable need to know everything as soon as puckishly possible—“because of you being you. We’re dead . . . or worse.”